Late blooming writer E. Annie Proulx won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for "The Shipping News," which was made into the 2001 movie starring Kevin Spacey. Three years later in 1997 Proulx had her short story, "Brokeback Mountain," published in the New Yorker Magazine.

Her story about gay cowboys has considerable sympathetic resonance since it was published exactly one year before a horrific real life event resulted in a cowboy in Wyoming being left to die in a shameful example of gay bashing. In an example of truth being stranger than fiction, Proulx lived close enough to where this event took place that she was actually called to serve on jury duty for the subsequent trial. Needless to say, she was dismissed.

With this movie Ang Lee further cements his reputation as one of the most versatile and very best directors alive in the world today. The range of the body of his work is just phenomenal, covering the ground as it does between his sensitive portrayal of Jane Austen's, "Sense and Sensibility" in 1995 to the glorious Chinese martial arts movie, "Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon" in 2000. Earlier he also did a celebrated 1994 "foodie movie" titled, "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman," and in 1997 he directed a story about alienated suburban families in "The Ice Storm."

However, even a genius can stumble, so I will let pass without comment the fact that he also directed "Hulk" in 2003.

In spite of the weakness of the story, this movie once again allows Lee to play to his strengths with his masterful direction resulting in inspired acting and scenes of breathtaking power whether they be the wide open vistas of the glorious Rocky Mountains or his tightly controlled interior shots that amaze and disturb us with their claustrophobic power.

His locales abruptly alternate between the glorious, rapturously beautiful, high mountain country of Montana (this movie was actually filmed in Canada), and the depressingly dreary homes and farms surrounding the nearly dead communities that somehow barely hang on along the dusty, barren back roads and the little used railroad tracks.

The people in this story don't live in the high country; they only visit and work there, and then only during the summer. Down in the valleys where they really do live presents us with scenes that are so dreary as to be almost hellish. It is easy to see that to live here is barely to exist. (Since this movie takes place beginning in 1963, the advantages of the outside world coming in over cable and the internet have yet to be experienced.)

The problems with this movie are many and they all have to do with the story itself. For example, in one scene that seems strange, but maybe it is because she is so mousy, Alma spies Ennis and Jack passionately kissing each other when he comes up from Texas for their very first fishing trip. She says nothing, does nothing. My wife opined that this would be unnatural as any woman who loved her husband would immediately rush outside with a frying pan in her hand and chase Jack off the property. Then she would come back and whack her husband a couple of times for good measure.

This movie is filled with little vignettes like this where we are left with having to make assumptions about motives and rationales.

All of the relationships in this movie are poorly explained. I worry when one character tells another, "You sure don't talk much," as this is always a shorthand signal to me that the writer, perhaps due to laziness or a lack of imagination, doesn't wish to disclose anything pertinent.

Every single relationship in this movie is situational in nature with little emotional underpinning for why each begins and why they all later fail. They just happen, they exist (usually unhappily), and then they die, all of which takes place with little or no explanation and minimal visuals provided so that we are constantly forced to make overly simplistic assumptions. Since this movie is all about relationships, I am left disappointed that the story never makes it clear as to why the characters make some of the decisions that they do.

I can certainly identify with their angst and their pain as they try to grapple with the direction of their interlocking relationships, but the characters, especially the two male leads, seem to have no ambition (or personality) whatsoever. They have no apparent outside interests and both seem to be more than happy to remain in their own little time warp with little concern that there is a world out there that is passing them by.

The result is that at the end of the day all I am left with is a story about a bunch of uneducated Western rednecks who fail to interest me as personalities, and if I cannot identify with the characters then I am only marginally interested in their story.

Ranch hands Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) first meet while both are applying for a job offered by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid). The work involves tending a large herd of sheep which has to be moved to their summer feeding grounds in the high country. He hires both of them to move the 1,000 sheep and to guard and protect them from predators like coyotes, grizzly bears and wolves.

The beauty of the high country is contrasted with its isolation as they only see one other man during the course of the summer and he is the person who delivers food and supplies to them on a periodic basis.

On a particularly cold night Ennis is outside freezing as he is only wrapped in a blanket while Jack remains warm inside a small tent. Hearing Ennis toss and turn and moan from the cold, Jack invites him into the tent to keep warm. Their proximity leads to Jack pulling Ennis' arm over for warmth and soon the men are grappling in rough and lusty sex.

After the first incident, Ennis proclaims to Jack that "It's a one-shot thing we got goin' on here" and that he is going home to get married. Jack replies, "Ain't nobody's business but ours." Ennis then says, "You know I ain't queer," after which Jack responds, "Me, neither."

But there are many other incidents after that first night and soon Aguirre spots them through his binoculars cavorting around the camp together half naked. He has come up to the camp to tell them to move the herd down early as a winter storm is approaching.

This one summer of homosexual love destroys the ability of both men to enjoy heterosexual relations with their future wives. At least in the beginning both Ennis and Jack are bisexual since they father children with their spouses before both couples drift apart.

Well before he marries, Jack moves down to Texas where he continues to pursue the rodeo circuit as a bronco buckaroo with little success. One fellow rider asks him why he doesn't purchase a roping horse and Jack bitterly responds, "Do I look like I have enough money to purchase a horse?"

He seems to be forever locked into riding bucking bulls for the four to eight seconds that he can last on them, but then he is kissed by an angel in the form of Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway, here a long way from her role in "The Princess Diaries"), a rodeo rider who takes an instant shine to him. She has the good fortune of being the daughter of a successful farm implement dealer.

A tryst in the back seat of a car leads to a marriage with two very disapproving in-laws, since both Lureen's father, L.D. Newsome (Graham Beckel), and his wife, Fayette (Mary Liboiron), take an instant dislike to their daughter's choice for a husband. In spite of their negative feelings, however, they offer Jack a job selling combines and he turns out to be pretty good at his new career.

Years later Jack tells Ennis that he can "phone" in his relationship with Lureen, but it is unclear as to whether she cools on him, he on her, or the relationship just crashes due to the constant enmity between Jack and his father-in-law.

It does develop that Jack becomes the more homosexually active of the two since he later crosses the border into Mexico to look for a sexual partner. Furthermore, Jack is always the one who is driven to make the long trip up to Wyoming to rendezvous with Ennis. Ennis never reciprocates by coming down to Texas to visit them, a point that always bothers Lureen.

Ennis Del Mar does go home to marry Alma (Michelle Williams) right after the end of that first summer of 1963. The birth of two girls shortly thereafter throws their marital relationship into question as the two babies present a handful for this young couple.

The arrival of his children presents Ennis with a financial burden that he is unwilling to shoulder. He exhibits no ambition whatsoever, no desire to better himself, no wish to educate himself, and never enough love for Alma to make him want to improve the lot of his family. Ennis will always be a lowly paid ranch hand. He likes it that way as he has few needs and no wants, and he enjoys a hand to mouth existence that only needs to be rewarded with an occasional night out for a few beers at the local watering hole.

Thereafter except for the first reunion in a nearby motel room, all of Ennis' and Jack's later assignations over the course of two decades involve trips back to the high country around Brokeback Mountain for "fishing," as they tell their spouses. It is not made clear whether their attraction is enhanced by the magic and the sentimentality of the high country which needs to be experienced for their feelings for each other to be legitimatized. Or perhaps the high country just offers a locale that is convenient and private.

Jack later bitterly complains to Ennis that their rare moments together just aren't enough when he tells him, "I'm not you... I can't make it on a coupla high-altitude f**ks once or twice a year! You are too much for me Ennis, you sonofawhoreson bitch! I wish I knew how to quit you."

It's never enough for Jack and that will eventually present its own opportunities and problems.